Gender identity in Kenya: The other sex (http://www.dw.de/gender-identity-in-kenya-the-other-sex/a-17066591)
Brenda Okoth, 09.13.2013
Kenya's transgendered struggle with discrimination and an exclusionary legal system. Audrey Mbugua, one of the first transgendered people to publicly declare her identity, advocates for trans rights - including her own.
In 2007, Audrey had gotten her degree in biomedical sciences from Maseno University. Fresh out of campus, she was a few weeks into her first job with an agricultural research institute.
One morning... she got up early and... headed off to work. Little did she know that this would turn out to be one of the darkest days of her life.
When she got to the office, she heard that her colleagues were blaming her for the failed wheat harvest they had been expecting. "They implied that I was some sort of abomination or a jinn [an evil spirit] and because of what I was, and having associated with me, their crops had failed,"...
Audrey's sex on her birth certificate is male, but she always had an internal sense of being female - thus, she identifies as a trans-woman... But she's come up against considerable resistance, not only from her family and colleagues, also from society at large and a state system that does not accommodate transgender people.
Not too surprising really, we have people here in the US that would insist on an exorcism for their transgender family member, Kenya is no more backward than that!